Hamburg, the German port city home to the St. Pauli football club (Fußball St. Pauli or FC St. Pauli), hosts a sports team well known for its outspoken anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic politics and its staunchly progressive social activism. Founded in 1910, the club is located in the working-class district along the docks near the Reeperbahn red-light district, and for the past thirty years has maintained a certain cult following across Europe, initially attracting radicals, squatters, dockers, and prostitutes in the 1980s, and later, anarchists, punks, bikers, anti-fascists, and other politicized groups. Known as the “pirates of the league,” the club has adopted a number of shipyard-related visual icons, including the Jolly Roger flag’s skull and crossbones, which is the unofficial crest and seen everywhere, as well as anchors, galleons, and sword brandishing buccaneers. St. Pauli was the first team in Germany to ban right-wing activities and displays at its stadium, in response to hooligan fascists and neo-Nazis in the 1980s and ‘90s that were infiltrating matches across the country, fighting rival teams and police, and causing a great deal of violence and damage. The sticker “St. Pauli-fans gegen Rechts!” or “St. Pauli fans against the Right!” has been widely produced and distributed and is said to have sold over two million copies. Variants of “St. Pauli is brown [and] white,” the team’s home and away colors, are also common. Many St. Pauli stickers portray the revolutionary guerrilla leader, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Others incorporate ad-busting techniques and similar forms of culture jamming, as seen in the appropriation of popular television and cartoon characters such as Homer Simpson, Hello Kitty, and Beavis and Butthead.

One of St. Pauli’s closest rival teams, the wealthier Hamburger Sport-Verein (HSV or H$V), utilizes a blue, white, and black diamond crest that is often mocked in St. Pauli stickers.

Known as the “pirates of the league,” the St. Pauli Club has adopted a number of shipyard-related visual icons, including the Jolly Roger flag’s skull and crossbones, which is the team’s logo and seen everywhere, as well as anchors, galleons, and sword brandishing buccaneers.

St. Pauli was the first team in Germany to ban right-wing activities and displays at their stadium, in response to hooligan fascists and neo-Nazis in the 1980s and ‘90s that were infiltrating matches across the country, fighting rival teams and police, and causing a great deal of violence and damage. The sticker “St. Pauli-fans gegen Rechts!” or “St. Pauli fans against right extremism!” has been widely produced and distributed and by now is said to have sold over two million copies. There is even a Facebook page for Sankt Pauli Fans gegen Rechts.

Ultras named on stickers refer to extreme football fan clubs and can lean both left and right. Several St. Pauli fan clubs have been formed in the last 20 years, including the Sankt Pauli Skinheads in 1996 and the St. Pauli Ultras in 2002. In these cases, skinheads, punks, and other alternative sub-groups are self-defined anti-fascists. You can get a good sense of the raucous nature of a St. Pauli game at The accidental ultra – St Pauli away (“away” meaning “visitor” to the Brit author).

The revolutionary guerrilla leader Che Guevera is represented on many St. Pauli stickers, as are other iconic figures, including the American actor John Goodman with a handgun from the movie The Big Lebowski and Yoda the Jedi Master from Star Wars.

Other football related stickers in this series include A.C.A.B. (or 1312), which stands for “all cops are bastards.”

Arline Wolfe at SLU recently catalogued over 100 St. Pauli stickers and added them to the Street Art Graphics digital archive (click on “sports”), or you can view the uncatalogued stickers on my Flickr site here.

One of my students at SLU, Carolyn Dellinger ’16, is starting to catalogue the Antifa Jugendfront stickers from Infoladen Daneben that I scanned over the summer (see Berlin-based sticker collections in previous post). From 79 original raw scans, I came up with a total of 48 edited image files consisting of 16 complete stickers, 4 full sheets of “pre-Photoshop” color-separated stickers, and various individual color-separated stickers and overlays. Carolyn also created seven image files that are diptychs or triptychs to show the color separations side by side. The 54 image files in this set can be viewed on my Flickr page for Stickerkitty’s collection (uncatalogued).

This is the first time I’ll be working with a student on more advanced cataloguing, and so it’s sort of a trial run for future Weaving the Streets & People’s Archive (WSPA) projects. One of the long-term goals for WSPA is to develop a process to train students and others on how to gather and catalogue examples of street art for a digital archive. The first step in cataloguing is to create standard metadata fields and terminologies. (Metadata is data about data.) In many cases, fields will be populated with the same metadata (i.e., creator = unknown, time span = 1991, geographic location = Berlin, Germany, etc.). Students will then complete the more difficult fields, such as description, subject, key words, and themes.

Below is the outline for cataloguing the Antifa Jugendfront stickers. Information in [brackets] will be used as is for every record. Carolyn will create new metadata for the fields marked in bold.

Title [Antifa Jugendfront – and all or most of the main text on the sticker using a logical, “natural language” approach in approximately 10 to 20 words]. We’re using “AntifaJugendfront” at the beginning of each record in order for the stickers to appear together in the digital archive.

I did some research last week on Antifa Jugendfront and was surprised and delighted to find that several examples of the stickers we’re cataloguing are also available online at the International Institute of Social History, based in Amsterdam. I’ve never come across street art graphics catalogued to this extent, and for the geeks out there, the records have call numbers, as well as super geek MARC (MAchine-Readable Cataloging) standards metadata (which stopped Arline in her tracks).

The sticker Gegen Sexismus und Frauen-Unterdrückung (http://search.socialhistory.org/Record/788102) is included in the IISH catalogue, but in this case it’s represented as a poster at 29.5 x 42 cm. It’s also dated ca. 1989, so that confirms the time span we have listed in our database.

“… when they embody visions of a possible future that influence the larger social imagination, and when they sculpt the desires of the protestors themselves for the better. In these ways, resistance can become symbolic action, protests become like religious ritual — and in those ways, even more important.”

(Made me miss my dad, again.)

B2B also means back to Berlin!!!!!! I’m heading over on Thursday for a week, and once again, same as my last trip, the stars are aligned for good things. A series of demonstrations around the world will take place on Saturday, October 15, for “a global revolution.” I’ve been trying to find a single Web site for the event, which I realize is impossible, but have only come up with various FB sites and YouTube videos. Knowing what I’ve seen in German stickerland, however, I’m sure there will be some serious street art in Berlin. I’m also making a short trip to Hamburg this time. A few people have indicated that Hamburg has a pretty lively street art scene and left-wing political antifa culture.

I also learned today the Stroke Urban Art Fair #5 will be in Berlin this weekend, October 14-16, 2011. Hot dawg! SLU students, Spencer-la, and I traveled to Munich in May 2010 to see Stroke #2, and everyone said how the Munich show was much more focused on sales and $$. Richer clientele. The Berlin version is supposed to be a little more alternative. We’ll see.

By good fortune or great coincidence, I met someone in the Inuit art world who was actively involved in German street art in the late 1980s and early 1990s – working with others in stencils, stickers, and posters. He contributed to the publication of “hoch die kampf dem: 20 Jahre Plakata autonomer Bewegungen” (“20 years of autonomous movements posters”) and “vorwärts bis zum nieder mit: 30 Jahre Plakate unkontrollierter Bewegungen,” which on Amazon translates awkwardly to “forward to the down with: 30 years of posters of uncontrolled movements.” When I put “with others” above, he told me that individuals rarely worked alone. Rather, people worked in collectives—by consensus in small associations for a particular protest, or in more long-term antifa movements and support network for autonomous centers (his words, not mine). The first publication is available as a PDF PlakatbuchBand1, and it appears to be reviewed online here. Both publications come with CDs, which may be a little more difficult to track down.

Even though I don’t speak German, I can see in the first publication that some of the themes and graphics found in contemporary stickers date back several years to the mid- to late-1980s, such as “Atomkraft: nein Danke!” (“Atomic energy? No thanks!”) and “Kein mensch ist illegal” (No one is illegal”).

The other weird coincidence is that this guy from Germany goes by kleiner kosmonaut, and when I looked online, I found this:

Which looks a little like the wallpaper in the Jetson Room at the John Morris Manor B&B where I stayed when my twin nephews graduated from Hobart William Smith a few weeks ago in May.